There are even two Tom websites directly celebrating the strange connection, thomascartoons.com and Cartoonthomas.com. Is there something about the name Tom, especially in its truncated form, that draws out a male child’s inner cartoonist, revealing some kind of deep Lamarckian link between the name and the activity?

One can only say that some are born Tom, some achieve it and some have it thrust upon them. Either way, all our best cartoonists share the same moniker, even those who don’t, or at least didn’t.

Known casually in the profession as “non-Toms,” these unfortunates were all given perfectly good names by their parents, but were driven by some strange, internal pressure to alter them, like a self-inflicted circumcision.

They themselves find their choices hard to explain. Many appear to have been possessed by some dark, elemental force, akin to a gender identity crisis. They are the Caitlyn Jenners of the art world.

“I just had to release my inner Tom somehow, anyhow,” said Dan Perkins shamefacedly, who found both solace and his true identity as the improbably named Tom Tomorrow.

In an exclusive interview, Mr Tomorrow was asked why he had exchanged the equally functional, monosyllabic and euphonious Dan for Tom.

“I mean Dan, Tom, what’s the difference? Dan Future sounds just as good to me,” I noted, adding that Macbeth had pretty much cornered the critical word with “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.”

But Perkins checked me with a gesture. “It wasn’t the Tomorrow that drew me,” he blushed. “It was the Tom. ‘Tomorrow’ just gave me a chance to repeat the first syllable, like a tom-tom. Coulda been Tomato, Tomahawk or even, for Mexican readers, Tamales.”

Tom/Dan glanced at his drawing board as though just saying the
sacred noun had made his fingers twitch.

“Not even for a moment,” he continued, “did I consider Yassir Yesterday or Toady Today, or even Fauntleroy Fortnight. It just had to be Tom.”

Cartoonist Tom Preston, who was actually born Andrew Dobson, likewise felt an uncontrollable urge to change his perfectly good name.

“I was like the Richard Dreyfus character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” he said shakily, “with that space-ship tune going on in my head — Tom, Tom, Tom, Tom, Tom. And then I began to draw things.”

Ruben Bolling, or Tom the Dancing Bug, says that he also can’t
explain his choice of pseudonym, except that all his life he hated
being called a Dick. “Cut that one off pretty fast,” he said.

Weirdly enough, not even Ruben Bolling is his real name. He was actually born Ken Fisher, so Ruben Bolling itself is a pseudonym, which is a relief. The idea that anyone would actually name their kid after a pastrami sandwich on rye is too unsettling to contemplate, though a guy with a pseudonym for his pseudonym also seems really fucked up.

“Yeah, well, I mean Ruben, I ask you,” Tom the Dancing Bug said unconvincingly, as though he had nothing to do with it. “I just hadda change my name and it wasn’t going to be Dick or Harry, so that left Tom. I have no idea where the bug came from, but who ever does?”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the name Tom has no attraction for women cartoonists, no matter how much professional success its adoption might guarantee. They all seem to prefer Jen, for some reason — Jen Sorenson, Jen Wang, Jen Vaughn, etc. It all seems even weirder than the Toms, frankly.